Suppose that you were on safari when a rare white rhino suddenly appeared from the bush. How would you feel if you didn’t have a camera with you? I had that happen, but I was prepared. Well, I wasn’t on safari, I was walking in the local park, and it wasn’t actually a rhinoceros, it was a flock of pelicans. But those are details. The important point is to have a pocket camera for unexpected photo opportunities.

Did you know that there are pelicans in San Francisco Bay? An important clue is that Alcatraz is an archaic Spanish word for pelican. Pelicans are often sighted on the Pacific Coast, cruising in strung-out formations like ancient warplanes on a mission. Our local Coyote Hills Regional Park abuts the south part of San Francisco Bay, and it hosts pelicans in the tidal marshes. They generally stand around waiting for mission assignments.

On a recent walk we came upon a classic pelican flight.

That’s the Dumbarton Bridge in the background, and the nearer ponds have been used traditionally to harvest salt. The picture is okay, but the birds are too distant to identify. The surprise was the follow-up by several more pelican flights, one of which wwent right over the shoreside trail where we stood.

Besides being small, birds have the inconvenient habit of moving around quickly. That makes a careful composition unlikely. I quickly snapped this photo with my pocket camera (Nikon P6000) set to 4X telephoto:

This is a good start, especially since it was captured without a lens that can show Mars full frame, equipment that good bird photographers use. The pelicans are large and they were flying low. These are American White Pelicans, less common than Brown Pelicans.

The image needs to be cropped vertically, for sure, but the lead pelican has his beak right up against the top of the frame. Cropping out the LP leaves four pelicans, and you cannot make a good composition with an even number of objects. The solution is to use Photoshop to move the LP down away from the edge to provide some head room. It’s easy to move around birds against a plain sky because there is no complicated background to match. I boxed the pelican with the selection tool, then copied and pasted.

After pasting, the clone stamp tool is used to erase the original placement and feather in the surrounds of the repositioned LP. The clone stamp selection takes into account the gradient toning of the sky. Copy neighboring sky of the same tone.

I darkened the sky to finish this opportunistic image.